The mall’s owners kept stiff upper lips, promising to find new tenants. But the pressure on retail brick-and-mortar stores is enormous and will only be worse three years from now. I know, it’s impossible to imagine an empty Oak Park Mall. It was impossible to imagine the end of Metcalf South, too, or Indian Springs. Yet both were torn down.

There are important lessons here for local leadership. It’s almost forgotten now, but Overland Park spent nearly $10 million to subsidize parking and other improvements to lure Nordstrom to Oak Park Mall.

The city’s bet probably paid off — Overland Park gets serious sales tax revenue from the shopping center. Generally, though, giving incentives to retailers is a loser’s game for the metro as a whole because new stores don’t bring many new buyers. They simply take them from other stores.

The result? Tax revenue shifts from city to city, but few new dollars end up in city treasuries overall. It’s called the “substitution effect,” and it means public retail incentives end up harming taxpayers.

The trend will only accelerate as more buyers opt for Amazon and other online alternatives. There is general agreement: The idea of a regional destination mall, which brings in shoppers from small surrounding communities, is likely gone forever.

That makes planning now for the future imperative. Overland Park and private developers must start thinking about what might happen at the Oak Park Mall site. That process should include contemplating the shopping center’s eventual demise.

That doesn’t mean paying off new retailers. It means making decisions based on an understanding that an eventual transition to other non-retail uses may be inevitable.

The stakes are high. If Indian Springs can close, so can Oak Park. And if Oak Park can close, so can other retail attractions — even, say, the Country Club Plaza, where Nordstrom is headed next.

Ludicrous? No. There’s no inherent reason retailers on the Plaza would be immune to the pressures felt by other stores at other malls. The Plaza’s mix of restaurants and taverns makes it a destination now, but that could change quickly.

The Plaza is more fragile than most Kansas Citians know. That means Kansas City must be proactive now and link policy decisions in other districts to a coming transition along Brush Creek.